Readers' Choice Awards: Parallels Desktop and 24-inch iMac

Ever since we put some plaudit-dispensing duties in the hands of our readers three years ago, Apple has enjoyed a stranglehold on the Readers’ Choice Awards. In 2004 and 2005,
Macworld
readers from our Web site and our Reader Panel have decided that Steve Jobs and Company have made the best hardware and software of the year. But in 2006, Apple’s reader awards streak has come to an end—and it’s a product that helps you run Windows on a Mac that’s responsible.

By an overwhelming margin, our readers declared that
Parallels Desktop for Mac
from
Parallels
was the best software of the past 12 months. The virtualization software lets users install and run operating systems other than Mac OS X on an Intel-based Mac without ever rebooting their computers. In a year that saw such cross-platform capabilities enter the consciousness of more Mac users, Parallels took center stage, even steering the spotlight away from Apple’s own
Boot Camp
solution. Readers seemed to recognize the significance of a program that makes the Mac a more compelling option for users in multi-platform settings—including people who might not even have considered the Mac just a few years ago.

The ability to quickly and easily install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac for cross-platform computing easily out-paced the seven other finalists, including Boot Camp, which finished a distant second. Also receiving a chunk of votes were the 3-D mapping application
Google Earth
and Apple’s revamped
iTunes 7
music and video player/organizer. Other software finalists included the digital photography workflow application
Aperture, the
Firefox
Web browser, the organizational tool
Yojimbo, and
>Flip4Mac, which gets Windows Media files to play in QuickTime.

Apple may be have lost out on our Readers’ Choice Award for software, but the company isn’t going home empty-handed, maintaining its iron grip on the Readers’ Choice for hardware of the year. In a tight three-way race, the
24-inch iMac Core 2 Duo
edged out Apple’s two laptop offerings, the
MacBook
and
MacBook Pro, by the slimmest of margins.

Given how popular Apple’s laptops have proven to be, how did the iMac wind up on top of our reader survey? If we had to guess (besides the possibility that the MacBook and MacBook Pro split the laptop-loving vote), we’d say it was all that performance packed into the
24-inch iMac’s
2.33GHz processor. The first round of Intel-based iMacs were impressive, but swapping out their original Core Duo chip for a next-generation Core 2 Duo model sped things up considerably—so much so that
our benchmarks
found that the 24-inch iMac outperformed a quad-core 2GHz Mac Pro in many tests.

The Readers’ Choice Awards are given out in conjunction with
Macworld
’s annual
Editors’ Choice Awards. We solicit nominations for hardware and software in our
forums, and then provide a list for finalists for readers to vote on. Voting takes places in the Macworld.com forums as well as through Macworld Reader Panel polling conducted by market-research firm Karlin Associates.